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Q-Zine: Quarterly Bulletin on Sexual Minority Groups in Africa vol. 6. no.1
Revista Letras Raras
Queer Africa: literature as art of resistanceThe discussion about literature as a fictional space of resistance in contexts of oppression in life is rich. Relatedly, we find literary works by African authors that represent queer bodies in fictional spaces in which, in life, are marked by homophobia and/or the criminalization of homosexuality. This article therefore aims to thematically present Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction and Queer Africa 2: New Stories. To this end, we discussed the context of criminalization of homosexuality in the authors’ birth countries and brought to the debate African and Africanist scholars who discuss how the theologization and politicization of the religious discourse, according to which queer people are sinful and deprived of the grace of God, and the discourse of the tradition, according to which homosexuality is a product of the West and, therefore, un-African, seek the permanence of the status quo in these countries. During the thematic analysis of the short stories and the analysis of “Pub 360” based on Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, we realized that the short story writers brought to the fictional world the representation of the conflicts experienced by characters who discover or live their sexuality in the midst of homophobic or criminalizing contexts and the love and passion of couples who live and explore their sexuality in their daily lives; that is, it is the human and humanizing experiences of queer bodies represented in the short stories that make these collections an art of resistance not only for the representation they make, but for their very existence.
2021 •
Contrary to anthropological discourse, which establishes exclusive links between homosexuality and initiation rites, and colonial discourse, which often documents unequal relationships between partners, present‐day literature increasingly projects the Plutarchan charis or reciprocal obligingness. This chapter outlines developments regarding gender and sexuality in three stages. The first stage is from the mid‐nineteenth century and the fin‐de‐siècle European sexual imaginary to the sexual initiation models of the 1970s in African countries as well as diasporic milieus, such as in France at a time when philosophy is imbued with Sartrean existentialism, and the United Kingdom with its first “Afro‐Queer” protagonists. The second stage is from the late‐twentieth‐century narratives of sexual emancipation to the turn of the millennium to the contemporary moment culminating in transgenderism and the last stage include new vocabularies and new subjectivities created via the new media in the first two decades of the twenty‐first century.
2014 •
This paper argues that African writers who set out to give the literary world an African perspective of the Indigenous people during colonialism did so by giving a convenient image of the African’s sexuality. This image stems out of the fact that the African’s sexuality was one in which same-sex relationships were portrayed as cultural imports of colonialism and not practices that were inherently part of the African. The paper shows how some influential West African writers either depicted homosexuality as evil or ignored it altogether despite the reality that was happening in the African continent. Furthermore, though there were instances in which the missionaries themselves were hypocritical in their denouncing of homosexuality this was not picked up by writers of African literature at the time. The gender politics was such that writers created an ideal image of the African male that was seen to have strong physical and spiritual characteristics to the effect that notions of homos...
Names fashioned by gender: Stitched perceptions
QUEER(ING) ONOMASTICS: NAMES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NONNORMATIVE GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES IN SELECTED SHORT STORIES IN QUEER AFRICA: NEW AND COLLECTED FICTION2022 •
2016 •
This long essay discusses the homophobia that is embedded in the cultures, laws and religions of Africa. Applying Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, the paper analyses seven short stories by different African writers such d Stanley Kenani and Monica Arac de Nyeko. The thesis argues that culture, law and religion are responsible for growth of homophobia in Africa as they institutionalize heterosexuality and penalize alternative sexualities including homosexuality. This paper investigates how fiction writers use the same three factors to denounce homophobia through characters that are defiant and rebellious. The study concludes that homosexuality in Africa is suppressed by powerful institutions such as culture, law and religion and that the performativity of gender is fabricated by these institutions.
2024 •
This article explores the resistance exhibited by queer characters against homophobic legislation and religious norms within the framework of gender performativity in selected short stories from Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis focuses on narratives from diverse regions, including Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” and “In the Best Interests of the Child” (Malawi), Monica Arac de Nyeko’s “Jambula Tree” (Uganda), Davina Owombre’s “Pelican Driver” (Nigeria), Emil Rorke’s “Poisoned Grief” (Zimbabwe), and Dolar Vasani’s “All Covered Up” (Tanzania). The article argues that the queer protagonists featured in the chosen short stories actively resist societal pressures towards compulsory sexuality and assigned gender roles. Within the sociopolitical contexts of the characters, laws and religious doctrines prescribe and enforce a heteronormative framework that homosexual characters are compelled to adhere to. The theoretical framework guiding this analysis draws from Judith Butler’s gender performativity, which challenges the assumption of a direct alignment between biological sex and gender identity. According to Butler, being biologically male or female does not dictate one’s gender identity, and the same principle applies to sexuality. The article examines how heteronormative laws and homophobic religious doctrines contribute to the construction of mandatory sexuality and assigned gender roles. Through the lens of characterisation, the article analyses how queer characters in the selected stories actively challenge and denounce the homophobia perpetuated by these legal and religious structures. This exploration sheds light on the nuanced ways in which gender performativity theory manifests in the lived experiences and narratives of queer individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism
Queer Pan-Africanism in Contemporary Africa2020 •
This chapter focuses on pan-Africanist discourses in contemporary Africa specifically in relation to the politics of sexual and gender diversity. It begins by examining the populist use of pan-Africanist rhetoric in narratives mobilizing against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) identities and rights. It then proceeds by discussing an emerging counter-narratives employed by LGBTI activists, communities, and allies, in which pan-Africanist thought is used to reimagine Africa from queer perspectives. Finally, it examines the strategic invocation of transatlantic black memory and black traditions of thought within these pan-Africanist queer counter-narratives and explores their political significance. Thus, this chapter foregrounds and explores how, in the words of Hakima Abbas and Amina Mama, 'Pan-Africanism as theory and praxis is in constant dialectic with other African political and intellectual thought including socialism, Black consciousness, Black nationalism, African queer thought and activism, as well as in polemic counter-position with present-day manifestations of imperialism.'
2021 •
This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term 'pioneer' for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theoriza-tion based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions-as it always has-only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication , a Euro-American centre. 'Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as "data" or "evidence," not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies' (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in 'suave', for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to 'define' African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers. Inspired by Francis Nyamnjoh's and Stella Nyanzi's work, we argue that studying the quotidian is a critical first step. Even as we follow up on an existing body of literature on queer sexualities in African societies, this literature shows how the investigation of the everyday is easily subsumed by other concerns; our aim is thus to centre people's practices and experiences as a focal axis of theorizing. Rachel Spronk is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In her work on gender, sexuality and the middle classes she combines the ethno-graphic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. Email: R.Spronk@uva.nl S. N. Nyeck is a visiting scholar at the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory School of Law and a research associate with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Mandela University.
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